The Virginian

Sunday, May 31, 2015

Americans pride ourselves on being people who have a government. But these days, it more often seems as if we’ve got a government that has people.

And that government is even selecting who its people will be, having–within a generation–essentially imported a state’s worth of new people through immigration.

Since 1970, the number of “Hispanics of Mexican origin” in the U.S. has jumped from fewer than 1 million to more than 33 million. If all these Mexicans were a state, it would be the second largest in population in the country, trailing only California.

Did you vote to approve that immigration policy? Did anyone? In fact, the federal government allowed it to happen without any voter input. That’s by design.

As Ann Coulter has pointed out:

-- America has already taken in one-fourth of Mexico's entire population.

In the evening after the All State Choir conference in Louisville, Kentucky, competitors returned to their Hyatt Hotel to rest up. What ensued is something that will just send chills down your spine and make pride swell in your heart.

These talented singers gathered on the balconies of 18 floors and chose to sing our National Anthem.

Saturday, May 30, 2015

Perhaps the answer is found in Thomas Babington Macaulay: “And how can man die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his gods?”

Tribe and faith. Those are the causes for which Middle Eastern men will fight. Sunni and Shiite fundamentalists will die for the faith. Persians and Arabs will fight to defend their lands, as will Kurds and Turks.

But who among the tribes of the Middle East will fight and die for the secular American values of democracy, diversity, pluralism, sexual freedom and marriage equality?

Who will fight and die, literally, for abortion on demand, militant atheism, multiculturalism, free Obama phones, gay marriage, the "hook up" culture and pornography on the wide screen? All these "freedoms" will be washed away by true believers who are willing to die for their beliefs and view these things that the secular West values as abominations.

The Stranger

Friday, May 29, 2015

American colleges and universities, long thought to be the glory of the nation, are in more than a little trouble. I've written before of their shameful practices — the racial quotas and preferences at selective schools (Harvard is being sued by Asian-American organizations), the kangaroo courts that try students accused of rape and sexual assault without legal representation or presumption of innocence, and speech codes that make campuses the least rather than the most free venues in American society.In following these policies, the burgeoning phalanxes of university and college administrators must systematically lie, insisting against all the evidence that they are racially nondiscriminatory, devoted to due process and upholders of free speech. The resulting intellectual corruption would have been understood by George Orwell.

The old college model has worked well for the hard sciences, but the humanities and social sciences have made the university a cancer on American culture. Graduates from these courses have worthless degrees outside of academia, creating a demand inside the higher education bubble for ever more social science slots teaching more social science majors in an endless cycle, creating a cohort who believe that George Orwell wrote a "how to" manual.

The residential college model, with its bloated ranks of coddler/administrators, has become hugely expensive and increasingly dysfunctional. It's overdue for significant downsizing.The Ph.D. university model is also metastasizing. A plethora of humanities and social science Ph.D. theses are produced every year, many if not most written in unreadable academic jargon and devoid of scholarly worth. Most will probably be read by only a handful of people, with no loss to society. But some worthy scholarship will be overlooked and go unappreciated.A glut of Ph.D.s and an ever-increasing army of administrators have produced downward pressure on faculty pay. Universities increasingly hire Ph.D.s as underpaid adjuncts, with low wages and no job security.

Putin said in televised comments Thursday that he found it "odd" that the probe was launched at the request of U.S. officials for crimes which do not involve its citizens and did not happen in the United States.

Ann Coulter gives 29 facts about immigration that you did not know. For instance:

-- In 1970, there were almost no Nigerian immigrants in the United States. Our country is now home to more Nigerians than any country in the world except Nigeria.

-- America takes more immigrants from Nigeria than from England.

-- The government refuses to tell us how many prisoners in the United States are immigrants. That information is not available anywhere. But the ancillary facts suggest that the number is astronomical.

-- There are more foreign inmates in New York state prisons from Mexico than from the entire continent of Europe.

-- Hispanics are less likely to be in the military than either whites or blacks, and a majority of Hispanic troops are women. On the other hand, Hispanics are overrepresented in U.S. Prisons.

-- At least 15 percent of all births in Peru and Argentina are to girls between the ages of 10 and 15. In the U.S., only 2 percent of births are to girls that young, and those are mostly Hispanics, who are seven times more likely to give birth at that age than white girls are.

The Bernie Sanders Save the Children Fund

As a speaker was about to begin her lecture criticizing gay marriage Tuesday on the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara, about 30 students seated in the front rows stood with signs, turned to face the rest of the audience and let loose.

There's a reason that California is known as the home of fruits and nuts.

“It was really, really nice,” says Hickman’s granddaughter, Andrea Martin. That’s part of the reason she’s so surprised her grandmother sold the home in 1993 for a mere $30,000. Despite a debilitating stroke, Martin says Hickman remained sharp, and she had always been business-savvy. As an Avon saleswoman, she had at times ranked among the top ten in the country. “So I don’t know why,” Martin says. “Maybe she just wanted out from underneath it, but to sell it for such a low number — I don’t know. Maybe she got bad advice, maybe she was just tired.”

The home’s new owner: Elizabeth Warren, today a Massachusetts senator who has built a political career on denouncing the sort of banking titans and financial sophisticates who make a buck off the little guy. Five months after purchasing Veo Vessels’ old home, Warren flipped the property, selling it for $115,000 more than she’d paid, according to Oklahoma County Property Assessor records.

Medical students are taught to do no harm. Law students are instructed that they may not assist a client in the commission of a crime. The analog for ethnography students ought to be equally straightforward: if a subject asks you for help in a murder plot, just say no.

But the good news is that there's a good chance her story is largely fiction.

There’s also a chance, at least according to those worried media allies of the president, that the Supreme Court will strike a blow against Obama’s big domestic triumph in the already embarrassing King v. Burwell case. That’s the one challenging the subsidies for Obamacare being offered through federally-run health insurance exchanges, on the grounds that the law clearly states that the subsidies are only available to to those enrolled through state-run systems, and because 36 of the states reasonably chose to have nothing to do with the Obamacare monstrosity the decision will have significant consequences. The former adjunct professor constitutional law’s lawyers are arguing that to insist a law be enacted as written is picky-picky-picky, and that no one should expect a 2,000-plus page bill to be free of significantly consequential errors, and never mind those statements by the bill’s “architect” that the language was clearly intended to coerce states to go along, and that, c’m’on, it’s Obama. This will probably prove persuasive to at least one of those wobbly Republican appointees, although we can hope that Chief Justice John Roberts might seize the opportunity to repent for his vote in that awful decision on the general constitutionality of Obamacare, and in any case there will be some black comedy in the arguments and a cautionary tale about passing 2,000-plus page bills that fundamentally transform a sixth of the economy and don’t promise to be free of errors with significant consequences.

Tuesday, May 26, 2015

“When my People descend upon [Lowndes High School] and if they are met with even the slightest inclination of resistance by any pale skinned beast or aid they are more than Justified to Take your Head and post it on a stake for the Entire world to See,” Sheppard wrote in his profanity-laced “memorandum ultimatum.”

“Many still question the possibility of my surrendering to the people who call themselves ‘authorities,'” Sheppard wrote. “To give you a simple answer, No. I will not turn myself over to any white man.”

Sheppard, who sports a trimmed beard and is often seen wearing traditional African garb, spoke to his weapons case and condemned the criminal justice system as merely the descendant of slavery.

Quoting former Nation of Islam leader and New Black Panther Party chairman, Kallid Abdul Muhammad, Sheppard wrote of whites, “we give them 24 hours to get out of town by sundown.”

“I say, if they don’t get out of town, we kill the white men, we kill the white women, we kill the white children, we kill the white babies, we kill the blind whites, we kill the crippled whites, we kill the crazy whites, we kill the faggots, we kill the lesbians, I say god dammit we kill ’em all,” Sheppard continued.

“If they are white kill ‘em all.”

He also advocated killing “all the old crippled crackkkas.”

Sheppard concluded the missive, quoting Sara Suten Seti, a popular Youtube race warrior, who said that the “Mission is to Slay the Children of this [White] Beast One by Goddamn One!”

In a country of over 300 million people you will have every kind of kook imaginable. But this student at Valdosta State University is not a lone would-be terrorist. He was part of a demonstration on the campus that was trampling the American flag. The woman, and Air Force vet who picked up the flag was arrested.

In demonstrations throughout the country, black mobs are looting and attacking police based on lies: “hands up don’t shoot” being just one of them. The media propagandize for the rioters by spreading the lie and by telling us that the rioters are “mostly peaceful” even as they show the burning, looting, rock throwing. The civil authorities in places like Baltimore are doing everything to encourage the rioters and official Washington is doing all it can to make the riots a “righteous” act.

That makes Eric Sheppard and his views of white people part of the mainstream of the culture created by the Left, the media and the Obama Administration. You have to hand it to him; he promised to fundamentally transform America and has succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.

Monday, May 25, 2015

Sunday, May 24, 2015

At Friday's Department of Defense press briefing, Brigadier General Thomas Weidley gave it the full Baghdad Bob:

In Ramadi, after a period of relative stability in the tactical situation, Daesh [Isis] executed a complex attack on Iraqi Security Forces today. These forces were able to repel most of these attacks, but some gains were made by Daesh in previously contested areas...

Iraqi Security Forces, as well as federal and local police, continue to control most of the key facilities, infrastructure and lines of communication in the area. Ramadi is a major population center, the provincial capital of Iraq's largest province, and a location where Iraqi Security Forces, police and local tribes have been working together for nearly a year to defend.

Since the beginning of OIR [Operation Inherent Resolve - seriously], the coalition has provided precision air support for the ISF with approximately 420 airstrikes in the Fallujah-Ramadi area. In the past month, we've conducted 165 airstrikes in support of Iraqi Security Forces in Ramadi, which have destroyed operational resources and facilities such as Daesh-controlled buildings, fighting positions, armored and technical vehicles...

Recent efforts by the government of Iraq to enroll Sunni tribes within the popular mobilization forces will provide additional needed combat power to Ramadi ISF commanders. As well, the coalition remains steadfast in support of the government of Iraq within Ramadi...

We firmly believe Daesh is on the defensive throughout Iraq and Syria, attempting to hold previous gains... They no longer field large conventional formations; they travel in civilian vehicles, they travel in small numbers, which, again, slows their -- their ability to move in and around the battlespace, and their ability to maneuver is very, very limited at this point...

Again, we see the lack of training and the rush to deploy inexperienced replacements to the battlefield...

Etc. Americans interested in an honest assessment of what's happening are better off skipping the Pentagon briefing and listening to the locals hightailing it outta there:

"Ramadi has fallen," Muhammad Haimour, a spokesman for the provincial governor of Anbar, told AP Sunday. "The city was completely taken. ... The military is fleeing."

Indeed. The Pentagon has an unrivaled comic genius when it comes to naming its operations. General Weidley is Chief of Staff, Joint Task Force for "Operation Inherent Resolve". If one had to name the single quality most obviously lacking in local ground forces, in the "60-nation coalition" and in US strategists, that would be it. Iraqi troops fled their US-supplied government buildings and then, at the edge of town, abandoned their US-supplied Humvees to melt into the local population, hopefully with nothing US-supplied about their person to give them away. The Humvees and the buildings are now in the hands of Isis. That's the great thing about taking on a "60-nation coalition". When you roll over them in nothing flat, the stuff they leave behind is world-beating state-of-the-art.

Almost exactly twelve years ago, I spent two days in Ramadi - one coming, one going. I wandered around the streets, browsed the shops, ate in the cafes, all in the same suit-and-tie get-up you can see me in on stage and telly. And I got the odd surly look but no beheading. Because, in the spring of 2003, the west was still believed to be serious. Now they know we're not.

That's a terrible thing to tell your enemy. And once you do, alll that's left is to boast of the scale of your ineffectualism. As General Weidley assured us:

The coalition has provided precision air support for the ISF with approximately 420 airstrikes in the Fallujah-Ramadi area. In the past month, we've conducted 165 airstrikes in support of Iraqi Security Forces in Ramadi...

That and $4.75'll get you a decaf latte at the CentCom Starbucks.

In America Alone (personally autographed copies of which, etc, etc), there's a passage where I'm on the highway to Ramadi through the western desert, and, over the charred ruin of an Iraqi tank, pondering the words of Sir Basil Liddell Hart - that what matters is to destroy the enemy's will, and, if you're not prepared to do that, destroying his tanks makes no difference. Nor do 420 sorties, nor 420,000 sorties. "Sortie", by the way, is French for exit. Maybe something's getting a little lost in translation here, but it's hard to tell the difference between a sortie strategy and an exit strategy.

And, of course, when you let one enemy know you're not serious, everyone else gets the message, too - from Putin in the Ukraine to Beijing in the South China Seas to Assad bringing his temporarily mothballed chemical weapons up from the basement to every ragtag jihadist militia minded to overrun a US consulate.

What does Isis on "the defensive" look like? They're now in Afghanistan, and controlling Libyan seaports. Any reason why they should stop there? From today's Daily Mirror:

Terror group Islamic State are using human trafficking gangs to smuggle militant extremist to the west.

The jihadi organisation is utilising the Mediterranean refugee crisis to sneak their fighters into Europe, an investigation has revealed.

Intelligence sources say ISIS are working with the cruel people-smuggling network to hide terrorists, bent on destruction, on boats among stricken refugees.

Experts claim ISIS is also capitalising on the emergency in the region to fund its terrorist activities by taxing people smugglers.

Abdul Basit Haroun, an adviser to the intelligence service of the Libyan government, said he had spoken to boat owners who operate in IS-controlled areas who told him the group takes a 50 per cent cut of their income.

The Mirror and the rest of Fleet Street are tapdancing around the genius of what Isis is doing: They conquer territory, terrorizing the locals, beheading and raping on an industrial scale, and sending millions fleeing - and then, having caused a "humanitarian catastrophe", they turn it into a cash cow. In effect, Isis is now running the humanitarian rescue from Isis. They're simultaneously the Nazis and Schindler - if Schindler's list were full of crack German agents he were smuggling into Britain. Which is a hell of a business model.

Where do these guys want to flee to? Europe.

No problem, says Isis. We'll become co-owners of the human-smuggling racket. It's all upside: we overwhelm EU refugee procedures, ensure that among all the losers in the hold are plenty of the savvier jihad boys - and use the cash to fund expansion in other areas.

Once you start ceding territory, where does it stop? Why should Piraeus prove any more of a fortress than Ramadi? Richard Fernandez writes:

Like the monster in the movie, it's taken "three billion electro-volts of energy and it's still coming on"! Why have none of the previous heavy blows slowed ISIS or any of the affiliated rebel groups down? Why is the jihadi organism inexplicably resistant to leadership disruptions, whether caused by drone strikes or the murderous work of rivals from other factions? How can it stand against the Olympian thunderbolt? This is an important question to answer.

It's resistant because it is not a state.

No it's not made of "solid nuclear material". But unlike a state, headed by an Emperor of Japan or Fuhrer, Islamic militancy has the apparent ability to reconfigure itself on the fly.

There's a lot of truth in that. A state needs territory, but Isis doesn't. Having stolen everything it wants, killed everyone it hates and destroyed everything in sight, it can abandon Ramadi for new killing fields. The Islamic State is less a state than a state of mind.

Then again, most western nations are not states, either - not in the conventional Westphalian sense of coherent entities pursuing state strategy. Unlike Britain, America has chosen to run its global order not through conventional expressions of national interest (the British Empire) but through post-Westphalian institutions - the IPCC for "climate change", the "60-nation coalition" for war. The UN-style post-state model strikes me as all but useless. By comparison Islamic imperialism has come up with a form of post-state transnationalism that's boundlessly flexible, encompassing conventional war, global crime syndicates, and the ability to spontaneously ignite "lone wolves" from Sydney to Copenhagen to Garland, Texas.

Meanwhile, our official no-Islam-to-see-here brings only the certainty of further retreat. Even if one accepts the view that this is a "tiny minority" of "bad apples", absolving Islam of responsibility for the cancer that nests within it ensures that there's nothing left to do but what Liddell Hart tells us is strategically pointless: bomb vehicles and buildings. And, given that western taxpayers paid for those vehicles and buildings, it's even more stupid.

Where's our wit and nimbleness and "ability to reconfigure on the fly"? After 14 years, we've learned nothing. Announcing another 473 bazillion sorties and marveling at how swimmingly the US-funded Iraqi Army Please-Don't-Run-Away-Quite-So-Quickly Program is going is not only a sign that we're losing, but that we don't even know enough to know we're using the wrong metrics.

Connie Phillips, wife of Democrat Sherrod Brown (D- Ohio) is outraged that Christians don’t want the poor to use their welfare money to buy “…cookies, chips, energy drinks, soft drinks, seafood, or steak.” She goes on for another 700 words to accuse Christians of “oppressing the poor.”

I read to the end and was waiting for her defense of “the poor” using your tax dollars and mine to buy junk food and luxury items that are now being priced out of the reach of the non-poor who are supporting the poor. The reason never comes. It’s just one of those things that are so obvious to Liberals that no reason is needed.

Obviously the poor should be able to use your money to buy lobster and steak. Obviously cookies, chips, energy drinks and soft drinks are part of the staples that the poor need to live. To deny them the right to use your money to buy them proves that you are a bad Christian and a hypocrite.

Connie's husband, Sherrod Brown, is best known for accusing President Obama of sexism after Obama suggested that Elizabeth Warren didn’t know what she was talking about in opposing the TPP trade deal.

Feminist author Cintra Wilson writes in Salon (a house organ of the angry left) that the notion of Palin as vice president is "akin to ideological brain rape." Presumably just before the nurse upped the dosage on her medication, Wilson continued, "Sarah Palin and her virtual burqa have me and my friends retching into our handbags. She's such a power-mad, backwater beauty-pageant casualty, it's easy to write her off and make fun of her. But in reality I feel as horrified as a ghetto Jew watching the rise of National Socialism."

And that's one of the nicer things she had to say. Really.

On Tuesday, Salon ran one article calling Palin a dominatrix ("a whip-wielding mistress") and another labeling her a sexually repressed fundamentalist no different from the Muslim fanatics and terrorists of Hamas. Make up your minds, folks. Is she a seductress or a sex-a-phobe?

But this any-weapon-near-to-hand approach is an obvious sign of how scared the Palin-o-phobes are.

Gloria Steinem, the grand mufti of feminism, issued a fatwa anathematizing Palin. A National Organization for Women spokeswoman proclaimed Palin more of a man than a woman. Wendy Doniger, a feminist academic at the University of Chicago, writes of Palin in Newsweek: "Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman."

The sad thing is that this thing is effective because for every Feminist head-chopper there is a small army of "journalists" who spread the message in kinder, gentler ways. The analogy is the Muslim community which is looking to see who is going to come out on top and is willing to give the crazies, the bombers, the throat slitters the benefit of the doubt and explain that they are the real victims.

Walter Russell Mead Gets It Wrong

Writing in The American Interest, Mead compares two events:

This weekend saw U.S. Special Forces pull off a stunning raid, flying deep into Syrian territory in an attempt to capture a senior Islamic State leader called Abu Sayyaf. Sayyaf, a Tunisian citizen, was killed in the raid, but his wife was caught and the raid produced “a significant intelligence gain” according to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.

Around the same time, however, the Islamic State made huge strides in Iraq by taking over the city of Ramadi, the largest city in Sunni al-Anbar province, only 68 miles west of Baghdad. ISIS boasted of seizing tanks and executing dozens of Iraqi soldiers and militants. The United States increased its bombing campaign around Ramadi as Shi’a militia began massing for an assault to retake the city.

He says this was A Tactical Success, A Strategic Failure. But the Abu Sayyaf raid did not rise to the level of a "tactical success." In this war, the death of one man is strategically meaningless unless the death is that of the person creating the strategic loss.

Comparing the "stunning raid" to capture Abu Sayyaf (who was killed, not captured) to the loss of Ramadi is like comparing jaywalking to murder. Yes, they are both against the law, but that is where the comparison ends.

When I read reports of American Special Operations successes in the war on Islamic radicals I am reminded of Otto Skorzeny. For those who are not amateur historians, Skorzeny was in the Waffen SS during World War 2. He participated in a number of high visibility raids. The most famous was his rescue of Mussolini from his captors at Gran Sasso. But the important thing to remember is that despite some brilliant raids by men like Skorzeny, Germany lost the war. They lost because they lost ground and were finally overwhelmed.

I have no doubt that the German press gave lots of coverage to the isolated successes of people like Skorzeny even as the Allies were over-running the Third Reich. It may even have fooled some Germans into thinking they could win. But it was just a sideshow and had no effect on the war.

The idea that an ideological/religious movement like ISIS and its offshoots can be defeated by killing the occasional leader here and “important person” there is delusional. The Islamist movement is not a nation with a capital that can be captured … or a leader that can be killed. Bin-Laden is dead but the ideology is more alive than ever and its adherents are slaughtering Christians by the seashore for the edification of its followers. It’s not a movement of poor people that can be bought off with “things.” It is creating chaos far beyond its immediate area of operations. See the flight of thousands of refugees arriving not just in the Middle East but in Europe.

So what’s more frightening: That Team Obama believes what they’re doing is effective? Or that he does not?

A little Baltimore history told from a personal perspective.

Their supposed calls for dialogue are really a demand for monologue. The rest of us (meaning white people) had better shut up and accept the fact that we are all racist and everything is entirely the fault of white people, all white people. Then we should be made to pay (as Sharpton has so successfully modeled).

So what is true? I can only speak to what I know, but if we start including everyone’s stories and not just the politically correct stories or those that support “the narrative” being pushed by the Left as the only truth that matters, we may get closer to the actual whole truth.

Just putting in writing the things I actually witnessed in Baltimore in those troubled times will be enough to make some people hate me and call me a racist. I am willing to take that chance. Real dialogue, not just monologue, has to start with someone. I know I do not have the whole truth, but I do have a part of it and I may be that part’s only voice right now in Baltimore. Real truth, real dialogue, and real healing of our wounded city will only start when all legitimate voices are considered.

He notes that al-Baghdadi has said that he is waging a war of Muslims against non-Muslims, just as the Republicans have said that al-Baghdadi is waging a war of Muslims against non-Muslims. As if that weren’t damning enough, Saletan also notes that al-Baghdadi has said that his version is Islam is incompatible with western values, and that there are verses in the Koran and Hadith that urge violent jihad against non-Muslims, and sure enough many of those Republicans agree.

In other words, Republicans are taking ISIS at its word, which makes them just alike.

Now it appears the bin Laden agreed with many of the writers on the Left, having some of the more unhinged in his library.

We’re the snoopy sorts who will always seize the opportunity of a party to look over the nearest bookshelf, assuming there is one, and glean whatever insights it offers into the host’s mind. The fine folks at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence apparently share the same fascination with other people’s reading habits, and have helpfully compiled a list of the books that our brave fighting men seized during their raid on the home of the late Osama bin-Laden.

It’s a fascinating collection, although much of it is surprisingly familiar to anyone who has lately been invited to the home of an up-to-date American liberal. The list includes “Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies” and “Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance” by Noam Chomsky, the esteemed linguist and far-left political analyst, “The Best Democracy that Money Can Buy” by far-left journalist Greg Palast, “Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower” and “Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II” by far-left historian William Blum, as well as several other similarly fashionable far-left titles. We couldn’t find Frantz Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth” or anything by Maya Angelou or the “magical realists” of South America on the list, but otherwise bin-Laden seemed to share the same literary tastes as President Barack Obama or any other impeccable liberal. We’ve long marveled at the way pro-homosexual, pro-abortion, anti-God leftists have found so much common ground with Islamists who execute homosexuals and subjugate women in an attempt to impose totalitarian theocratic control, but their overlapping reading lists suggest they at least share the same dissatisfaction with western civilization.

Based on bin-laden’s reading list we can attribute the 9/11 attack on Leftist American writers? After all, who would not want to destroy the World Trade Center and everyone in it if your reality is the world created by the Left? We can be grateful that these people are not more widely read or we would have had more terrorist attacks.

Thursday, May 21, 2015

Among the many painful ironies in the current racial turmoil is that communities scattered across the country were disrupted by riots and looting because of the demonstrable lie that Michael Brown was shot in the back by a white policeman in Missouri — but there was not nearly as much turmoil created by the demonstrable fact that a fleeing black man was shot dead by a white policeman in South Carolina. Totally ignored was the fact that a black policeman in Alabama fatally shot an unarmed white teenager, and was cleared of any charges, at about the same time that a white policeman was cleared of charges in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown.In a world where the truth means so little, and headstrong preconceptions seem to be all that matter, what hope is there for rational words or rational behavior, much less mutual understanding across racial lines? When the recorded fatal shooting of a fleeing man in South Carolina brought instant condemnation by whites and blacks alike, and by the most conservative as well as the most liberal commentators, that moment of mutual understanding was very fleeting, as if mutual understanding were something to be avoided, as a threat to a vision of “us against them” that was more popular.That vision is nowhere more clearly expressed than in attempts to automatically depict whatever social problems exist in ghetto communities as being caused by the sins or negligence of whites, whether racism in general or a “legacy of slavery” in particular. Like most emotionally powerful visions, it is seldom, if ever, subjected to the test of evidence. The “legacy of slavery” argument is not just an excuse for inexcusable behavior in the ghettos. In a larger sense, it is an evasion of responsibility for the disastrous consequences of the prevailing social vision of our times, and the political policies based on that vision, over the past half century. Anyone who is serious about evidence need only compare black communities as they evolved in the first 100 years after slavery with black communities as they evolved in the first 50 years after the explosive growth of the welfare state, beginning in the 1960s. You would be hard-pressed to find as many ghetto riots prior to the 1960s as we have seen just in the past year, much less in the 50 years since a wave of such riots swept across the country in 1965. We are told that such riots are a result of black poverty and white racism. But in fact — for those who still have some respect for facts — black poverty was far worse, and white racism was far worse, prior to 1960. But violent crime within black ghettos was far less. You cannot take any people, of any color, and exempt them from the requirements of civilization without ruinous consequences to them and to society at large. Murder rates among black males were going down — repeat, down — during the much-lamented 1950s, while it went up after the much celebrated 1960s, reaching levels more than double what they had been before. Most black children were raised in two-parent families prior to the 1960s. But today the great majority of black children are raised in one-parent families.Such trends are not unique to blacks, nor even to the United States. The welfare state has led to remarkably similar trends among the white underclass in England over the same period. Just read Life at the Bottom, by Theodore Dalrymple, a British physician who worked in a hospital in a white slum neighborhood. You cannot take any people, of any color, and exempt them from the requirements of civilization — including work, behavioral standards, personal responsibility, and all the other basic things that the clever intelligentsia disdain — without ruinous consequences to them and to society at large. Non-judgmental subsidies of counterproductive lifestyles are treating people as if they were livestock, to be fed and tended by others in a welfare state — and yet expecting them to develop as human beings have developed when facing the challenges of life themselves. One key fact that keeps getting ignored is that the poverty rate among black married couples has been in single digits every year since 1994. Behavior matters and facts matter, more than the prevailing social visions or political empires built on those visions.

Clinton Joke

Hillary Clinton goes to her doctor for a physical, only to find out that she's pregnant. She is furious! Here she is about to run for President and this has happened to her.

She calls Bill on the phone and immediately starts screaming in a high pitched out of control voice: "How could you have let this happen? With all that's going on right now, you go and get me pregnant! How could you???!!! I can't believe this! I just found out I am five weeks pregnant and it is all your fault!!! YOUR FAULT!!! Well, what have you got to say???"

There is nothing but dead silence on the end of the phone.

She screams again, "DID YOU HEAR ME???!!!"

Finally, she hears Bill's very, very quiet voice. In a barely audible whisper, he says, "Who is this?"

Before your read it would you agree that Hitler and FDR were just alike? (read the whole thing)

The other recent contestant in our moral equivalence idiocy contest is someone named William Saletan, who took the digital pages of Slate.com to explain why Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is just like all the Republican candidates for president. He doesn’t allege that any of the Republicans hopefuls have been chopping off heads or doing any of the other deadly things that have brought the Islamic State such notoriety, but he does claim that they sound a lot alike. He notes that al-Baghdadi has said that he is waging a war of Muslims against non-Muslims, just as the Republicans have said that al-Baghdadi is waging a war of Muslims against non-Muslims. As if that weren’t damning enough, Saletan also notes that al-Baghdadi has said that his version is Islam is incompatible with western values, and that there are verses in the Koran and Hadith that urge violent jihad against non-Muslims, and sure enough many of those Republicans agree. He further notes that al-Baghdadi has warned Muslims that America has no respects for their rights, and although he can’t think of anything the Republicans have done to confirm this warning other than some gripes about a mosque being built near the former World Trade Center location and former Sen. Rick Santorum’s complaint that we’re not dropping enough bombs on al-Baghdadi’s Islamic State he still thinks that the IS and the GOP are pretty much the same. Indeed, he concludes that the GOP is “working for Baghdadi” by opposing it, and signs off with a haughty “Remind me again who’s naive.”

Perhaps it’s us who are naive, but to our ears the GOP candidates and al-Baghdadi don’t sound any more alike than Hitler and Roosevelt did when the former said his country was at war with us and the latter agreed that we were indeed at war. Of course, the modern liberal would also find some moral equivalence there.

You probably about heard about that big biker gang shootout down in Waco, just as you probably heard about the riots in Baltimore, and in both cases you probably concluded they were unfortunate incidents caused by unsavory people. Those who worry about such things, though, are worried the news media might have caused you to be more appalled by the latter than the former.

Almost all of the unsavory people rioting in Baltimore were black, many of the unsavory people shooting it out in Waco were white, and these days the ensuing coverage is to be judged accordingly. Over at Salon.com they were offended that the riot was typically described as a “riot” and the shootout as a “shootout,” while lawyer and “community organizer” Sally Kohn was among many who were offended that the rioters were often called “thugs” while those involved in the shootout as were more frequently dubbed “biker gangs,” all over the left side of the internet there was great consternation about the amount of attention being paid, and of course all of these discrepancies were blamed on the subtle racism of the American media. Such nuances are apparently intended to mislead the public into a racist opinion that blacks destroying black communities is a bad thing while giving a wink and a nod to “white on white crime.”

Which leads us to wonder what sort of coverage they would have preferred, and what damage it might do to the English language. What happened in Baltimore was a riot, after all, and what happened in Waco was a shootout. Neither term carries any racial implications that we are aware of, and we note that whenever opposing groups of unsavory black people shoot at one another, as occasionally happens, most news media usually call it a “shootout,” and when white people engage in violent public disorder, as occasionally happens, usually in the wake of some sports team’s championship, the same news media invariably call it a “riot.” If such sensitive sorts as Kohn think it racist to call the people who burned down a senior citizens’ home in Baltimore “thugs” they should take it up with the black mayor of Baltimore and the black president of the United States, both of whom also employed the term, and be reassured that “biker gang” carries a rather thuggish connotation. The coverage of the Baltimore riot lasted for several days, but only because the riot lasted that long, it followed similar rioting in the St. Louis area, and there were threats of more rioting in other cities due to the same lingering controversies of policing in black neighborhoods. The shootout lasted a relatively short time before local police were able to restore order, the nine dead were all willing combatants, the remainder were arrested and duly charged, there is no reason to believe that any other biker gang shootouts are imminent, and the continuing coverage is because the media rather like this kind of story.

Most of the media dislike black-on-black crime stories, which are far more numerous than the police shootings and deadly biker gang brawls and high society murders that always go on the front page, and it usually has to happen on a scale that requires calling in the National Guard to get more than six column deep inside the local and state section. This in part because black-on-black crimes are so common, in part because they expose the media to the now-inevitable charges of racial insensitivity, and in part because most of the media is itself so hyper-sensitive about racial issues that they’re willing to ignore a significant problem affecting black people to assuage their consciences. They’d much rather draw attention a white-on-white shootout down in gun-crazy and Republican-voting Texas, and will happily ignore the fact that it wasn’t exactly a white-on-white shootout. The shootout pitted the “Cossacks” against the “Bandidos,” and as the nomenclature suggests it was more of a whites-and-Hispanics-upon-one-another gunfight, and apparently it had more to with the biker gang subculture’s strange rules regarding the patches worn on motorcycle jackets and the usual drug turf disputes than race, and a lot of the mug shots are ambiguous enough that some of the Bandidos could fit into that “white Hispanic” category that The New York Times created for George Zimmerman after he killed Trayvon Martin in self-defense, so most of the media are happy to give the impression of “white-on-white crime.”